Release & QA Analyst (Hybrid)

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 600 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Finland and beyond. 

Our next generation of real-time market data platform operates around the globe, 24 x 7, connecting to 6+ financial exchanges, delivering real-time market data, benchmark prices, news content and research data to our customers around the world.  This is an exciting and unique opportunity to join our team to help shape and build our financial data platform that will help power the business through the next phase of its digital growth.

The new platform is being engineered for the cloud as a set of scalable, fault-tolerant microservices with rich web and mobile UI’s. Our technology stack is largely Microsoft, although we also leverage a number of open source software adopting the right tool for the job approach.

As a Release Manager / QA Engineer reporting into the Digital Platforms Delivery Manager your time will be focused on planning, testing, tracking, release, deployment, communication, and risk management.

PRINCIPLE ACCOUNTABILITIES

1. Release Planning
2. Communication and Reporting
3. Release Testing
4. Maintaining Release Processes

KEY INTERFACES

• Digital Platforms Delivery Manager
• Engineering Managers
• Product Owners / Product Management
• Software engineering team
• SRE

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

A successful candidate will have:

• Hands on Release Management experience
• Hands on QA experience
• Solid understanding of Software Development Lifecycle
• Good understanding of application infrastructure, system architecture, and operating systems
• Ability to handle software infrastructure management & configuration management
• Experience in coordinating cross-functional teams up to task completion
• Release and testing automation experience using programming languages, tools, and frameworks; Cypress, Selenium, Playwright, Cucumber (Gherkin Syntax), TestNG, or a similar testing framework
• 2-6 years of experience in the use of Jira for release management including Jira Releases, Jira Roadmaps, and Zephyr Test Type Jira Tickets (Zephyr plugin for Jira)
• Knowledge of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
• Experience in using at least one of the following Build & Deployment tools: GitHub Actions, Octopus, TeamCity, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, AWS etc.
• Experience in using other day-to-day development tools such as GIT and various CLIs (Bash, cmd.exe, PowerShell), ability to use Kubernetes and Azure CLIs is a plus
• Experience in working with DevOps and Agile methodologies.
• A computer science degree or a similar discipline
• 7-9 years of experience in working in an IT environment
• General PC knowledge including Microsoft Office with expertise in Excel and a working knowledge of Access

A successful candidate will likely have some of the following:

• Experience in at least one of the following programming languages: C#, Java, Python
• Project management experience
• Knowledge of traditional agile methodologies, including Scrum, Waterfall, or Kanban
• Knowledge of market data, commodity exchanges and financial instruments

Personal Attributes

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Excellent analytical skills
• Structured thinking
• Team management skills
• Continuously looking for ways to improve (yourself, your team, the code the processes)
• Strategic thinker with the ability to execute and deliver in a fast-paced environment
• Highly collaborative and able to work across multiple teams and geographies
• Results-driven, with a focus on long-term value creation

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
   
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
   
• GROWTH MINDSET. This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
   
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
   
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
   
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.